Maybe Americans resent Martina Topley-Bird. Does she really need to be quite so cool and English, with her fancy hyphenated name and her cred-boosting Tricky backstory and her Mercury Prize-nominated solo debut? Maybe we take one look at the cover of her new CD -- originally called Quixotic but renamed Anything for us dumb Yanks -- and we just can't help it: There she is, all green and glittering and glamorous, and we just have to hate her or who knows, maybe the terrorists win, Prince Charles becomes our president, and we all have to smear baked beans on our toast. How else to explain why Martina Topley-Bird isn't ruling the airwaves right now?

Granted, no one besides a handful of club kids and car-commercial producers
cares about trip-hop anymore, but Topley-Bird needn't worry. She hasn't so much
cast the genre aside as transformed it into something that's both weirder and
more inclusive. Check out the liner-note credits: When the musical guests range
from Tricky to Josh Homme and Mark Lanegan (of art-metal provocateurs Queens
of the Stone Age), you know you're under a pretty big tent, as the Republicans
are fond of saying. From the cracked folk of the title track to the exquisitely
raunchy "Ragga," from gauzy ballads to club-thumping anthems, from glitchy electronica
to slithery soul to spooky jazz, Topley-Bird assumes different styles, inhabits
them for a nice long groove, and then saunters off to the next experiment. Call
it trip-hop if you have to, but really it's just sexy pop music that you can
dance to or not. Who but a terrorist would object to that?